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writercises2015-05-28 03:01 pm
mbarker.livejournal.com) wrote in writercises2015-05-28 03:01 pm
TECH: YouTube Video #1?
Interesting. I was talking with a friend about finding material on the Internet, and they made some comment about being able to find all kinds of useful videos on YouTube. I'm not a big YouTube viewer, but I thought, "What the heck, let's see what we find." So I plugged in "writing fiction ideas" as a search term, and... flash of light, bang of thunder... found a whole list of bits and pieces. Here's my transcript of the first one (and notes at the end).
tink
http://youtu.be/rWNDpXqo-Ik
Writing Fiction & Poetry: How to Generate Short Story Ideas
By David M. Harris
How do we find the idea for a short story? Not one that's already written, but one that we want to write ourselves? Well, one thing we can do is read a good book about writing short stories such as this one, Creating Short Fiction by Damon Knight, which happens to be my favorite of the books that will help you to write.
But we're not just looking for a story that happens to be short. It has to have the beginning, the middle, and the end. The easiest way to sum it up is really that you have a person... And whether that person is an alien or a bunny rabbit or a human being, it doesn't matter, it's still a person... Who has a problem and strives to solve that problem and doesn't necessarily succeed.
We can have a short story in which the protagonist fails, but learns something nonetheless. That learning is enough of a triumph, enough of a victory for the reader to be satisfied. The protagonist doesn't have to be satisfied, the reader has to be satisfied.
So we either succeed or fail, presumably fail nobly, fail meaningfully, and the protagonist should be changed in some way. Change is what we are always looking for in a piece of writing, on a good piece of writing. Something is going to change.
Ideally, what you have is at least two ideas going on at the same time. Damon Knight talks about the intersection of two ideas, bringing together two perhaps unrelated ideas and seeing how they will both affect your story.
In a number of classic short stories, for example, in The Hills Like White Elephants, you have two people who are waiting for a train and they're drinking quite a lot and they're evading the issue that they are really needing to discuss. We don't even know what their final decision is. The man picks up their bags and puts them by one of the train tracks to go someplace, but we don't know in which direction they wind up going. So we have their intersection with the landscape, their intersection with their problem, their intersection with their apparent drinking problem. All of those things going on together, and it is where they mesh that would create the interesting short story.
---------------
My notes: Not particularly deep, but I do see two basic ideas here. First is the framework or the description of story as being a person with a problem, their efforts to overcome or resolve the problem, and their success or failure. Part of the key here is realizing that the external story, the problem, striving, and success or failure, also has an internal component, the learning or change in the person. That's really what we want to read about, is the reaction of the person, not just the ricocheting events.
Which brings us to the second idea, that of two intersecting ideas. Don't depend on just one idea, get yourself a couple of ideas and let them run into each other! That's what gives your story the richness and echoes, is the intersection of ideas.
tink
http://youtu.be/rWNDpXqo-Ik
Writing Fiction & Poetry: How to Generate Short Story Ideas
By David M. Harris
How do we find the idea for a short story? Not one that's already written, but one that we want to write ourselves? Well, one thing we can do is read a good book about writing short stories such as this one, Creating Short Fiction by Damon Knight, which happens to be my favorite of the books that will help you to write.
But we're not just looking for a story that happens to be short. It has to have the beginning, the middle, and the end. The easiest way to sum it up is really that you have a person... And whether that person is an alien or a bunny rabbit or a human being, it doesn't matter, it's still a person... Who has a problem and strives to solve that problem and doesn't necessarily succeed.
We can have a short story in which the protagonist fails, but learns something nonetheless. That learning is enough of a triumph, enough of a victory for the reader to be satisfied. The protagonist doesn't have to be satisfied, the reader has to be satisfied.
So we either succeed or fail, presumably fail nobly, fail meaningfully, and the protagonist should be changed in some way. Change is what we are always looking for in a piece of writing, on a good piece of writing. Something is going to change.
Ideally, what you have is at least two ideas going on at the same time. Damon Knight talks about the intersection of two ideas, bringing together two perhaps unrelated ideas and seeing how they will both affect your story.
In a number of classic short stories, for example, in The Hills Like White Elephants, you have two people who are waiting for a train and they're drinking quite a lot and they're evading the issue that they are really needing to discuss. We don't even know what their final decision is. The man picks up their bags and puts them by one of the train tracks to go someplace, but we don't know in which direction they wind up going. So we have their intersection with the landscape, their intersection with their problem, their intersection with their apparent drinking problem. All of those things going on together, and it is where they mesh that would create the interesting short story.
---------------
My notes: Not particularly deep, but I do see two basic ideas here. First is the framework or the description of story as being a person with a problem, their efforts to overcome or resolve the problem, and their success or failure. Part of the key here is realizing that the external story, the problem, striving, and success or failure, also has an internal component, the learning or change in the person. That's really what we want to read about, is the reaction of the person, not just the ricocheting events.
Which brings us to the second idea, that of two intersecting ideas. Don't depend on just one idea, get yourself a couple of ideas and let them run into each other! That's what gives your story the richness and echoes, is the intersection of ideas.